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George Ziets opening a new RPG studio - Digimancy Entertainment

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Fallout and Arcanum took over three years. Pentiment, which is as about as small as it gets, looks like a Flash game, and has no combat system, is taking four years.

Fallout was made by an at the time big developer who was part of a publisher with an already existing cashflow from published projects and was in a position to spend a lot of money on their projects since they'd be asking for $60 prices anyway (and that at a time where $60 had a larger value than now). Even ignoring that, Fallout started with Tim Cain playing around making his engine, it wasn't until about a year into that that the game's development started properly.

Pentiment is made by Obsidian who has long been one of these teams too big to move fast due to all the management bureaucracy. They also have Microsoft's money to throw around now so they can take their time wasting as many resources as they feel like.

I don't know any details about Arkanum's development though Troika always had an issue of not managing the resources their publishers gave them correctly, which is why their games are massive bugfests despite their quality.

I don't think you can use AAA teams of 20-25 years ago or modern "AA" teams backed by big publishers and conglomerates like Microsoft to judge what a small indie team like Digimancy is able to produce. These are completely different circumstances.

All that scripting and programming a bunch of systems necessary for RPGs takes time.

Not really, what takes time is making the content of the game - from a programming perspective that'd be scripting the quests, though even that would be a minority - but the amount of that is also something that can be handled up front, especially by an experienced developer. It is something that often ends up wrong (most games tend to be delayed) but if a game scoped for 1-1.5 year ends up taking more than 3 years then something went very wrong somewhere.
 

LudensCogitet

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I agree man. I'm not gloating. It's sad, sad situation. My point is: it doesn't have to be that way. Nothing stops indie RPG studios to sprout in America like mushrooms after rain
As an American who is very unhappy with the current social collapse, moral degeneracy, etc. I'd be interested to know how different it is in other countries. For example, I'm a software engineer (not game related) and I sometimes worry about someone connecting me to my posts here and on other platforms. On video calls I use digital backdrops so people can't see the Gadsden flag on my wall.

I think the state of the American game industry has to do with fear of reprisal for not towing the line. It seems like the greats have either cucked, or been driven underground by the totalitarian woke. The enthusiasm is gone, because an attempt to form a group of like minded people would be leaped on and infiltrated and potentially black listed, even from things like banks.
First and foremost - none of that exists in Eastern Europe. Literally none. At least not yet. Secondly I can't help but feel that 95% of people are on their knees in fear of opinions of few procent of lunatics. What you wrote I realize to be unspoken truth for many, and I sympathize. You can feel it in way how devs speak, you can see it in way how their games are designed. But for those who think that if they capitulate before yet another insane demand that Insanity will stop or slow down? I have bad news
Glad to hear it doesn't exist. I hope it won't exist here eventually. I agree that capitulation is not the answer. I'm a game developer (on the side, and slowly, so that I feel like a fake calling myself that, haha). My plan is to just ignore the AAA industry. It's broken. We just need to start something new and stop caring what they think.
 

Roguey

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Fallout 3 and Skyrim took 3-4 years. Starfield takes 6-7. Gap between games is widening to ridiculous size. Gap between GTA and Elder Scrolls V and VI will be 10+ years, in both cases

American execs are getting stupidly greedy, your workforce is getting mongrelized, lazy and incompetent and your old guard is either cucked and silent or dying. You are so fucked, you don't even realize

Starfield is being made by hundreds of people, big teams are inefficient and unwieldy, yes.

Regardless of your opinion on it, Fallout 2 took a year to make.
Would have been a better game if it had two, three, or five years of development? Most likely not.

:hmmm:

Yes, it would have been better. And it took a year to make because all the ground work was laid out. I'm talking about making a game from scratch, not a slam dunk (which can be turned around within 1-2 years which has been proven numerous times).

Not really, what takes time is making the content of the game - from a programming perspective that'd be scripting the quests, though even that would be a minority - but the amount of that is also something that can be handled up front, especially by an experienced developer. It is something that often ends up wrong (most games tend to be delayed) but if a game scoped for 1-1.5 year ends up taking more than 3 years then something went very wrong somewhere.
See my reply to Rusty. Can you even name a recent RPG made from scratch that only took 1-2 years? AoD took a decade. Colony Ship is taking six+ years. Underrail took seven years. Atom RPG took three years. Black Geyser took seven years. Disco Elysium took three years. To my knowledge, no one has released a quality full-featured RPG that broke the three year minimum. The crowdfunded bunch(Pillars, Wasteland 2 etc) were out in roughly 29 months and they needed months of extensive patching to not feel like garbage.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
Yes, it would have been better.
lol no
when has a game ever been made better when it was nearly complete and they decided to work on it for a few more years?

And it took a year to make because all the ground work was laid out. I'm talking about making a game from scratch, not a slam dunk (which can be turned around within 1-2 years which has been proven numerous times).
toolset + assets they were working with was nothing compared to what you can get off the shelf nowadays.
 

Roguey

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lol no
when has a game ever been made better when it was nearly complete and they decided to work on it for a few more years?
Every game after extensive patching.

toolset + assets they were working with was nothing compared to what you can get off the shelf nowadays.
Tools are better, and yet no one can make an RPG faster.
 

Harthwain

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It is something that often ends up wrong (most games tend to be delayed) but if a game scoped for 1-1.5 year ends up taking more than 3 years then something went very wrong somewhere.
Battle Brothers went from Pre-Alpha to release in about 3 years. The team had 4 members (3 initially, if I am not mistaken) - 1 was the programmer and 1 was the artist. And these guys were VERY conscious to not get stuck in development hell due to feature creep. But for some time Battle Brothers was their part-time job as they had full-time jobs. They went into full-time development at some point.

Conscript - 1-man project was Kickstarted in July, 2020. The game is going to be 5-7 hours long, so a fairly short one (although it is supposed to have high replayability).

So I'd say you're too optimistic about small games taking 1-1,5 year.
 
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FO2 was one of the most notably underbaked RPGs I can think of when it launched. The game straight up didn’t work for scads of players. Don’t be dumb Rusty.
And yet it was patched within days. The final Fallout 2 patch released less than 3 months after the release of the game.
If you don't believe me, check for yourself, first patch on Nov 10th, last on Dec 17th:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000902161638fw_/http://www.interplay.com/fallout2/log2.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19990203005329/http://www.interplay.com/fallout2/files.html


damn so underbaked and unfinished that it took them days to fix it.
 

AliceAlcina

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I'm with Rusty. Long development often signals lack of funds or other problems that have little to do with bug fixing. I also see games taking extra time and then not capitalizing on it, releasing half baked games anyways, like Cyberpunk, that seem to be lame as fuck, but was in official development long.
 

Brancaleone

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Fallout and Arcanum took over three years. Pentiment, which is as about as small as it gets, looks like a Flash game, and has no combat system, is taking four years. All that scripting and programming a bunch of systems necessary for RPGs takes time.
Fallout 3 and Skyrim took 3-4 years. Starfield takes 6-7. Gap between games is widening to ridiculous size. Gap between GTA and Elder Scrolls V and VI will be 10+ years, in both cases

American execs are getting stupidly greedy, your workforce is getting mongrelized, lazy and incompetent and your old guard is either cucked and silent or dying. You are so fucked, you don't even realize
Depending on what level of graphics/production value you need for your market segment, it might mean that the bar of what is considered 'acceptable' gets raised quite a bit before you are done, which means you need extra development time to change engine/rework it extensively/get used to the new version of the engine you have in license, and during that extra time the bar gets raised even more, and so on.
 
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imagine if FO2 stayed in development and they were forced to "upgrade" the graphics to this
1014-1126547404-0a1cc5c67752bcaacc947736878c4f77.jpg


late 90s/early 2000s 3d graphics nearly all aged like fine milk
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Can you even name a recent RPG made from scratch that only took 1-2 years?

Does New Vegas count as "recent"? It was supposedly made in 18 months :-P.

I can't think of any but the sort of RPGs i've played in recent times are either very old games that doesn't make sense to even consider them or made by tiny teams / solo devs that again time stacked against them (especially if they were made in full or partial in the dev's free time). And TBH i almost never check how long it took to develop the games i play :-P unless somehow that aspect stands out.

I don't know how good (or not) it is as an RPG (since it seems to be based on a Disco Elysium style system that not everyone here agrees is an RPG), but by browsing Steam's "New & Trending" category i found Vampire: The Masquerade - Heartless Lullaby which from a quick search of its development history turns out it was made at ~7 months. Of course that is a short game.

AoD took a decade. Colony Ship is taking six+ years. Underrail took seven years. Atom RPG took three years. Black Geyser took seven years. Disco Elysium took three years.

AFAIK AoD was made in their spare time which is a very different thing as that alone can be a time sink. Also (AFAIK again) it was the first game and as such they were learning as they went which means they made a bunch of mistakes (=time) that they wouldn't make if they had more experience. Atom RPG seemed to be made in spare time as well with the development picking up after Kickstarter - and after the Kickstarter they didn't took much time to release the game.

But yes, there are RPGs that took a lot of time to be made, i didn't really argued for that though. What i wrote was that RPGs can be made in less time, not that all RPGs could have been made in 1-1.5y.

Battle Brothers went from Pre-Alpha to release in about 3 years. The team had 4 members (3 initially, if I am not mistaken) - 1 was the programmer and 1 was the artist. And these guys were VERY conscious to not get stuck in development hell due to feature creep. But for some time Battle Brothers was their part-time job as they had full-time jobs. They went into full-time development at some point.

Working part time can be a big time drain, what i was referring to was about people working fulltime on a game.

Conscript - 1-man project was Kickstarted in July, 2020. The game is going to be 5-7 hours long, so a fairly short one (although it is supposed to have high replayability).

1-man projects are kinda special because even a second person can almost double the performance since even if they aren't that great, it helps not having everything done by yourself. So it makes more sense for these projects - especially for RPGs - to take longer.

Also what i was thinking about wasn't even 1-4 people teams but teams of like ~15-20 people. It isn't like the less people the better, but above ~50 people you start to introduce a lot of inefficiencies.

So I'd say you're too optimistic about small games taking 1-1,5 year.

Note that i refer to RPGs specifically, which tend to be more complex than other types of games. Other types of games, including some genre defining ones, were made in way less time than that during the 90s (though of course expectations are different nowadays).

Also i note that i wrote it is possible to have an RPG made in ~1-1.5 year, not that all games would be like that. One thing i think i was explicit about was to scope for that time and not try to pretend you are a AAA team. I've worked on a team where an artist spent literally days on a couple of knife models, trying to get everything just right - but in a small team that mindset wont work, you'd need to get those knives made in a matter of hours at most. Will they look worse than even Skyrim? Of course they'll do, but if you are making a game with the scope of Skyrim and with a team that is less than Skyrim's team size then you are certainly not working on a game that'd be made in 1-1.5 years.
 

The Wall

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I'm with Rusty. Long development often signals lack of funds or other problems that have little to do with bug fixing. I also see games taking extra time and then not capitalizing on it, releasing half baked games anyways, like Cyberpunk, that seem to be lame as fuck, but was in official development long.
Whenever you hear that some game was "rebooted" during development, let alone more then once, you shoud be 1000% sure: that game gonna be shit. I don't understand why are we dancing around the truth which is pretty damn evident: American millenal/zoomer Devs are uninspired, spoiled, incompetent, lazy retards. Repeat after me: Simple As
 

The Wall

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American human capital is in terrible shape. And is only losing on its value, as retardation of American Nation continues. Games are made by people, people with moral and work ethics that are downstream from Culture. American culture has become retarded, and so have American games. Why is that so hard to understand? That Simple. Not joking :)
 

Roguey

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damn so underbaked and unfinished that it took them days to fix it.

Look at the list of bugs fixed in the unofficial patch.

Does New Vegas count as "recent"? It was supposedly made in 18 months :-P.

That is not from scratch.

AoD was made in their spare time which is a very different thing as that alone can be a time sink. Also (AFAIK again) it was the first game and as such they were learning as they went which means they made a bunch of mistakes (=time) that they wouldn't make if they had more experience.

Yeah, and Colony Ship which is being worked on full-time by experienced devs is still taking six years.
 

Butter

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Talking about years in development instead of total man hours is kind of dumb. No kidding Underrail took 7 years to make when it was one guy doing everything.
 

The Wall

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George Zeits should tell us "What is a woman?'
If he can't answer the question, he can't make good RPG. Simple As
Sphynx Question Time

Talking about years in development instead of total man hours is kind of dumb. No kidding Underrail took 7 years to make when it was one guy doing everything.
Also, incredibly important: WHO is making the game? If it's George and 7 merry trannies, just forget it. One look on their twitter profiles can tell you whether game will be shit or not. 95% accuracy chance
 
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Butter

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Talking about years in development instead of total man hours is kind of dumb. No kidding Underrail took 7 years to make when it was one guy doing everything.
Manhours isn't any better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
This is from the 70s though. Software development has slightly changed since then (even since 1995 when the 3rd edition was published). I doubt an extra programmer would've helped DW Bradley push out Wizardry 6 any faster, but the idea that a game on the scope of Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield would take the same amount of time regardless of manpower is absurd.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yeah, and Colony Ship which is being worked on full-time by experienced devs is still taking six years.

They've only made a single game and their first game took a lot of time, so i don't know how experienced they are on that aspect (and at least IMO from a development perspective 6 years is way too much for a single game).

But that's besides my point, which wasn't that RPGs should never need more than 1-1.5y. Remember that i wrote

me said:
a small scale RPG would certainly be possible as long as they didn't try to pretend they are a AAA studio

An RPG that isn't small scale would need more time, as would need a game that wants to have high end / cutting edge audiovisuals - especially for a smaller team. Also even if a small team does make a small scale RPG while cutting corners on the audiovisual side to help them make the game faster, they may still need more time because -e.g.- they didn't plan their development time right. Or because of various other factors, that may or may not become less likely with more experienced team members.
 

The Wall

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Why are people forgeting all technological advantages that Devs today have and Devs 20 years ago didn't have, that this disparity doesn't exist? It's like getting to the Moon. You were able to do it back when computing power of entire NASA was lesser then today's iPhone. How? Answer is simple. Total Societal Decline
 

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